Ben Hubbard delivers a fine account of the crown prince’s rise – and how the murder of a journalist did not bring him downIn 2015, the veteran New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote a “Letter from Saudi Arabia” in which he extolled a younger generation of Saudi royals and gushed that Mohammed bin Salman, five years later crown prince of the desert kingdom, brimmed with fresh ideas.Come 2017, Friedman announced: “Only a fool would predict [the] success [of Saudi reform] – but only a fool would not root for it.”In between the two columns, Prince Mohammed had embarked on an iron-fisted anti-corruption drive or purge, reportedly engineered the temporary detention and resignation of Saad Hariri, Lebanon’s prime minister, and openly backed a bloody civil war in Yemen against Iran and its proxies.Then, on 2 October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and journalist resident in the US and writing for the Washington Post, was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, reportedly at ...